Distinction, boundaries or bridges?: Children, inequality and the uses of consumer culture

28 February 2011

Associate Professor Allison Pugh

Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Virginia

by Allison Pugh in Poetics

Much existing work in the sociology of culture implicitly assumes actor motivations of status and domination. Yet this theoretical consensus attends only glancingly to the flip side of such behavior: those moments when people deploy culture, not only in a mobility project, but to connect. Based on a three-year ethnography of children's consumer culture in three diverse communities, Pugh finds that children often use consumer culture to belong—both to connect to others, and to achieve visibility in their social worlds. Pugh contends that children's common desires make inequality, particularly in their access to consumer goods, a challenge to the accomplishment of the connection for which they strive. Using insights from Erving Goffman and Randall Collins, Pugh finds children use processes of facework to navigate the problems arising from their differences from others, including those stemming from discrepancies in commodity possession. Out of five facework processes that Pugh identifies, she elaborates upon two that seem to challenge the notion that children seek sameness. Children's goals for consumer culture also differed from those of (particularly affluent) adults. Pugh suggests scholars need to reconsider their theoretical emphasis on exclusion over inclusion, and document the circumstances under which each is particularly salient.

Allison Pugh was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the US Studies Centre in 2011. Pugh is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. Whilst at the Centre, Pugh began to write a book on postindustrial meanings of commitment among parents whose experiences of trust and loyalty at the workplace and at home vary widely. Her manuscript examined the ascendant culture of flexibility and its implications for what we owe each other at work and at home. Pugh's research interests coalesce around the accommodations people make – particularly in their relationships at home and at work – to what feel like economic and cultural exigencies.